Tuesday 28 October 2014

'பதினாறு வயதினிலே' படத்தின் மறு பதிப்பு வந்தால் அதில் 'சப்பாணி' இருக்க மாட்டான் . ஏன் ?

நேர்பட பேசுவது ஒரு புறம் இருக்கட்டும் . நம்மில் பலர் நேர் பட நடப்பதற்கு காரணமாய் இருந்த Jonas Salk அன்னாரது 100 ஆவது பிறந்தநாள் இன்று .

இன்று நீங்கள் 'Google' வலைத்தளத்திற்கு சென்றிருந்தால் 'Thank You Dr.Salk' என்னும் Doodle ஐ கண்டிருப்பீர்கள் .

யார் இந்த Jonas Salk ?






Polio தடுப்பு மருந்தை கண்டுப்பிடித்ததில் மாபெரும் பங்கு அன்னாரையே சாரும் . அதை விட அவர்கள் மனித குலத்திற்கு செய்த பெரும் பணி , அத்தடுப்பு மருந்தை காப்புரிமை என்று சொல்லப்படுகின்ற Patent Laws கீழ் அடைத்து வைக்காதது தான் . அதனால் தான் உலகம் முழுவதும் உள்ள பல கோடி குழந்தைகள் தங்கள் குழந்தை பருவத்தை ஓரளவு இன்பமாய் கழிக்கிறார்கள் ஓடி ஆடி.


'பதினாறு வயதினிலே' படத்தின் மறு பதிப்பு வந்தால் அதில் 'சப்பாணி' இருக்க மாட்டான் . காரணம் Jonas Salk உம் அவரது கண்டுபிடிப்பும் .

இன்று Polio தடுப்பு மருந்தால் 99 சதவிகிதத்திற்கு மேல் அந்நோயின் தொற்றிலிருந்து காப்பாற்றப்பட்டுள்ளனர் . அது 100 % அடைய Polio தடுப்பு மருந்தை உங்களுக்கு தெரிந்த அனைவருக்கும் பரிந்துரை செய்யுங்கள் .

இன்று தடுப்பூசிகளுக்கு எதிராய் பல பதிவுகள் முகப்புத்தகத்தில் உலாவுகின்றன . அதை பதிவிடுபவர்கள் யார் என்று கேட்டால் நான் இயற்கை மருத்துவம் தெரிந்தவன் . இன்னும் தோண்டி துருவினால் ஆடு , மாடுகள் , சிட்டுக்குருவிகள் எல்லாம் என்ன தடுப்பூசியா போட்டுக்கொள்கின்றன என்று குதர்க்கமாய் கேள்வி கேட்பர் . சிலர் மதக்காரணங்களால் தடுப்பூசியை தங்கள் குழந்தைகளுக்கு போடுவது இல்லை .

நீங்கள் உலகை காப்பாற்ற ஏர் . கலப்பை எடுத்து செல்ல வேண்டியது இல்லை . உங்கள் குழந்தைகளுக்கு தடுப்பூசியை தவறாமல் போடுங்கள் .

ஒரு நோய் ஒழிக்கப்பட்டது என்று செய்தியில் சொல்லும் பொழுது அதற்கு அர்த்தம் அந்த நோய் கிருமியே உலகை விட்டு நாம் அனுப்பிவிட்டதாக அர்த்தம் இல்லை . நம்மில் பெரும்பாலோனோர்க்கு எதிர்ப்பு சக்தியை நாம் தடுப்பூசி மூலம் உருவாக்கிவிட்டதாய் அர்த்தம் .

ஆக Polio போன்ற கொடிய நோய்கள் மானுடத்தை தாக்கக்கூடாது என்றெண்ணிணால் உங்கள் குழந்தைகளுக்கு தடுப்பூசியை மறக்காமல் போடுங்கள் .அப்பொழுது தான் உங்கள் குழந்தை மூலம் அந்நோய் மற்ற குழந்தைகளை தாக்குவதற்கான வாய்ப்புகள் குறையும் .


Vaccines Save Lives 

Saturday 5 April 2014

Celebrate The Minds

Hi friends

Here I would like to share two observations on the concept of ' Celebrate the Minds '. 

What if people had never knew paddy needs water to grow , what if people had never observed the dry woods giving off fire sparks when they jostle , what if people had never observed dung beetle rolling the dung with ease when it is in round shape , what if people had never heard the sweet music when wind waft through bamboo forest. Plainly we would have never been the so called " Human " we are. Lets remind ourselves of those curious moments which actually was the great leaps of humanity than the jumps of Neil Armstrong which he made on moon under near zero gravity .

Another observation about human kind which always amazes me is the this .

Photo: Celebrate the Minds 

People lived in house with finite sizes . They had finite number of children. They hunted finite number of animals. They in the the end saw finite number of rising suns and moons. Still among them , some sought to find the meaning of ' Infinity '. 

Wondering how did they even construct such an Idea. If the idea of 'Infinity'  was conceived as a source of intellectual entertainment then it is the best even Science fiction idea that Man had ever conceived .

People lived in house with finite sizes . They had finite number of children. They hunted finite number of animals. They in the the end saw finite number of rising suns and moons. Still among them , some sought to find the meaning of ' Infinity '. 

Wondering how did they even construct such an Idea. If the idea of 'Infinity' was conceived as a source of intellectual entertainment then it is the best ever Science fiction idea that Man had ever conceived .

#CelebrateTheMinds

#BeingHuman

Humanity has always progressed because of relentless learning either through observation or mentors . In this age of self learning , opportunities to learn has exploded through Massive Open Online Courses like Coursera , EdX etc. 

The above question of Infinity is explained through Philosophical and Mathematical point of view in Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy course in Coursera. 

Lets Learn and Run the World . 

Links :

Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy

Tuesday 25 March 2014

A living super-organism amongst us . Of course not Yeti . Is it a Genie ? May be ! - Re imagination of an underrated urban utility


The world we live in, always has a liking towards fantasy. We have always attributed unexplained phenomenon through rich imagery which led to flourishing of tales and folklore within our culture. Atheists may call religion as a result of vivid imagination too. Imagination and intuition has always led us, the mankind to unravel deeper secrets of the universe like gravity.

If someone claims that City is a living being, how many of us would believe it. Many would out rightly reject such an idea and call it bizarre while some may philosophically attribute city to a body less-self that lives in every city dwellers heart. Though many of us can’t imagine city as a living being, we have no qualms calling a forest within a bustling city as the Lung of the city. Calling main roads as arterial roads is one such thing because main roads are compared to arteries that carry fresh oxygen rich blood to parts of our body. Such an attribute is quite apt because it is the roads which keep a city moving. Can we ever imagine a Chennai without Mount road or Bangalore without an M.G.Road. So such is the importance of roads in a city because of its function.

But there is one organ which is constantly overlooked in our body and is quite under-rated. That is Liver. We get reminded of liver only when there is a serious problem like Hepatitis or Cirrhosis and hence the awareness about liver is quite low. It is one organ which cannot be effectively replaced and is very essential for our survival. Interestingly it is the only organ which can regenerate itself when injured and that makes it resilient.

So why am I talking about liver here. Because liver plays a major role in detoxification of blood and there is one such utility in a city which does that. That is Waste water treatment plants, a public utility which is seldom cared for and which does a major role in increasing the livable standards of any city in this world. This utility is constantly overlooked, sometimes even forgotten from the collective consciousness of the city that 90 % of the people wouldn't know where the sewage from their homes gets treated.

So I call waste water treatment plants (WWTPs) as the liver of the city for it is essential for the very survival of the city itself. With the emergence of extreme weather events like Hurricane Sandy or Bay of Bengal cyclones that hit Bangladesh and India, WWTPs play a major role in resilience of the city to such events. In fact many major firms like IBM, Cisco, and Schneider are marketing their products for smarter cities for the very reason to improve the resilience of the city against such events and effective functioning of WWTP infrastructure is enlisted as one of the prime objective in all.

So what is meant by Smart management of a city? Imagine a room which is filled with dashboards that point to the every activity of the city just like an ICU where the patients vitals on shown on the screen. Smart management of the cities are increasingly going to depend on the data that we are going to harvest from every utility of the city say water supply and gas pipelines , electric lines , roads, storm water management , fresh water reservoir, sensors pointing to ambient air quality and so on. So that is the concept of Internet of Things (IoT) where data from various sensors are collected and analyzed to take remedial actions and the effect of such actions constitute the basis of smart city management.

So coming back, is WWTP an organ or a super organism by itself. The word Super Organism may sound intriguing and can arouse a sense of discomfort within our minds. So what is super organism?

The concept of Super organism goes back to late 18th centuries and it means ‘an organism consisting of many organisms ‘. Even our human body is sometimes referred to as super organism for our vital functions are very much aided by billions of microorganisms that reside in our gut. So why is WWTP, considered a super organism? This question needs us to dwell into our past to know how the concept of waste water management and treatment has evolved.

Until last century, waste water treatment had always been considered as a civil engineering problem and the methods to deal with waste water was to pump it out of the city and release it in wetland or river after some treatment. But with burgeoning population, such practices could not be continued due to the resource constraint, that is land and with increased regulation of river water quality. So the problem was probed with a microbiological outlook and that led to introduction of Activated sludge process which uses microbes to reduce the biological and chemical oxygen demand of the water. So WWTPs of today are super-organisms by itself for they are composed of a range of microbes from bacteria to algae to fungi to bacteriophages to protozoans which perform various functions like removing carbonaceous matter, removing ammonia, volatilizing organic matter, denitrifying nitrogenous matter, killing and removing disease causing microbes. They are silently working all day and they have innumerable symbiotic associations, predation and every social association that is found in an ecosystem like forest.

Sewage as we know supports a multitude of organisms and it was found that by encouraging specific set of microbes in the sewage by providing necessary conditions, the pollutants in the sewage can be degraded and sometimes harmful microbes can also be removed. After all, waste water is 99 % water. So this understanding brought a quantum change in how this problem is addressed and made it a multi-disciplinary problem which involves civil engineering, microbiology of soil and water, ecology, control engineering and recently it included data sciences, for we need to make sense of the data that we are increasingly receiving through sensors across the cities through SCADA systems (Supervisory control and Data Acquisition).

Despite all the complexities, waste water treatment hasn't caught the imagination of people as an interesting problem to be solved because it usually sounds more like a goodwill action to save the planet and does not make an immediate economic sense like creating a blockbuster mobile application which can make a developer, millionaire within a year.

But still, I would like to provide certain facts which might appeal you on why this is an interesting problem to be solved. A recent study shows that cities invest nearly 30 % of the investment in building and maintaining waste water treatment / management infrastructure but get no returns out of that. The treated water is let into the waterways and hence the expression of ‘money going down the drain ‘, is quite true in such a scenario. The major reason why waste water treatment is not taken up enthusiastically in spite of its perceived benefits is because it virtually gives no benefit to the investor other than meeting the regulatory limits of pollution control board. So the waste water treatment plants has to be re-imagined as resource recovery and resource recycling units where in the ‘break-even point’ of the investment should be achieved within a period of time just like how solar power plants are making sense with rising energy prices.

We, the nation of India actually have a humongous problem which needs to be fixed and that is saving rivers and water bodies from us. The billion dollar Ganga Action Plan involved building numerous waste water plants along the river and the end result is Ganga is as polluted as it was. It is called as a failure of epic proportions for various reasons with one being the extreme variation in climate that is found in Gangetic plains. Two months of sweeping hot dry loo winds, months of torrential monsoon rains and two months of freezing cold actually results in microbes getting confused and hence reduced the efficiency of the plants, therein making it a difficult problem. We have to remind ourselves that Gangetic plain is one of the densely populated regions in the world and if we didn't find a solution soon then we may lose the river itself and a human migration of epic proportion. Civilization around the world have always succumbed to water, be it scarcity or floods.

The famous temple of Angor Vat in Cambodia is actually a vestige of a much larger city which succumbed to acute water scarcity due to the faulty water management of the rulers then. Even the Indus valley civilization is said to have failed due to the exploitation of trees and natural resources which in turn reduced the resilience of the cities due to shifting course of River Indus.

And the last point is the waste water treatment market is really huge and it would be up for grabs once the government privatizes the waste water treatment utilities in line with the global trends. Nearly 75 % of the sewage in urban areas and 95 % in rural areas are now entering our water bodies and rivers untreated for the prime reason that we don’t have the system built in place to treat them. Major foundations like Melinda Gates foundation are offering huge funds for cause like clean toilets for the third world, which is actually a waste management cum design problem to be solved. The world is increasingly moving towards decentralized systems in place of centralized infrastructure and it is said that decentralized systems improve the resilience characteristics of any infrastructure. Hence re-imagining waste water treatment as resource recovery units for individual homes and communities could be an ideal alternative to huge public utility projects which is saddled with inordinate delays and scaling up costs.

Here is a word of caution for all warriors who have risen up to the challenge of creating solutions that matter to billions. Waste water treatment plants are not just an engineering structure or construct which can be controlled. It needs to be managed for they are living ecosystems just like a forest and we need system-level thinking to understand them in order to derive benefits out of them in a sustainable way. They are non-linear systems partly due to the activities of the microbes and partly due to the fact that they are part of our human society, for we humans produce waste water in our homes not in a steady state fashion but in a cycles which peak at various parts of the day . Couple that with huge shocks these plants have to encounter during rains and the ever changing weather conditions due to changing seasons.

Here is a trivia, before I end this note. In terms of volume handled, no other industry handles more volume than waste water and water treatment industry, not even the gargantuan petro-chemical industry.

Friends, Warriors and citizens of the world, lend your ears to the profound statements of this genius. We have come here to solve the problems that the mankind has produced and not create new problems of different kinds by having faulty assumptions in first place. 

We have risen up to solve them once for all. Hence lend your ears to his profound words on solving problems once for all.



If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about the solution - Einstein




Extra Readings :

Bee Hives : A super organism by itself .Read more about super organism in the series by Wired Magazine

Slow Death of River Ganga : A series in Tehelka Magazine

Tuesday 11 February 2014

A living super organism amidst us - Of course Not Yeti

People have always looked at waste water treatment plants like a part of city which should never exist in their eyesight and most importantly not in their backyard. But very few would have realized the fact that no other processing industry, not even gargantuan petroleum processing industry handles so much volume in comparison with waste water processing plants.

And the fun fact is waste water processing plants are indeed the living super organism which work day and night in processing the waste that the city generates. If city were a humongous animal then waste water treatments plants are like liver which handles the key aspect of sustaining life processes. Just like how if liver fails, the body goes through multiple organ failure , the same happens in city when a waste water treatment plant fails.

Waste water treatment systems is indeed a functional ecosystem like a forest for it supports diverse living organisms from prokaryotes to eukaryotes of varying complexities. The pollutants in the incoming waste water support the ecosystem and there arises the competition for the limited resources due to the varying life-cycles of microorganisms. Waste water treatment systems are indeed complex systems for they have microorganisms which contribute non-linearity behavior to the system coupled with the cyclic variation in influent flow and composition due to the cyclic behavior of human beings. In addition to that the systems face major disturbances during climatic events like rain and storm where they disrupt the system with massive hydraulic shocks.

In India and around the world, especially in third world countries, there is a prevailing low efficiency in biological treatment plants partly due to the above mentioned problems and due to the need for trained man power. The efficiency problem is usually attributed to plants not working in design conditions, lack of maintenance, sudden spurt or reduction of human activity in the catchment area and increases in extreme weather events. When we take an example of India, according to the report by Central Pollution Control Board only 13.5 % of the sewage generated in urban areas is treated as construction of plants is capital intensive. In addition to that treated water of nearly 39 % of the existing plants doesn't conform to the prescribed standards under the Environmental (Protection) Rules for discharge into streams.

In case of River Ganga, Ganga Action Plan was initiated to save the river from untreated effluent, with 80 % of it originating from households. Though STPs (Sewage Treatment Plants) were built along the river, they face disruption due to power shortages, wide variation in temperature with 49 degree Celsius in summer, 5 degree Celsius in winter and torrential rains during monsoon season which causes the plant to overflow.

So this shows the need for development of sustainable solutions to tackle this problem and also throws light on an important problem of whether the inefficiency of sewage treatment plants is purely an engineering problem or does it have an ecological paradigm that has gone unanswered, for sewage plant supports multitude of micro-organisms. Here, I would like to compare waste water treatment plant to a forest which supports organisms and does it with minimal human intervention. So here, I want to study on whether a waste water treatment plant can function with minimal human intervention and is there any missing links in the ecosystem of built environment which makes it fragile and reduces its robustness.

So this study would include analysis of microbial ecology of the built environment, identifying the appropriate consortium of microorganisms for specific operational conditions and study of functioning of an existing waste water plant like the Beckton Waste water treatment plant in East London which is actually the biggest plant in Europe as developing nations needs these solutions to meet the UN Millennium Development Goals to improve the livability in the emerging Mega Cities.

Understanding microbial ecology of waste water plants plays a major role in devising control strategies for the waste water treatment plants which are inherently extremely complex systems. With land and water becoming a scarce resource, there arises the need to develop modular, robust and efficient systems to treat the increasing volumes of waste water and to tackle the extreme weather events which wreak havoc in Mega cities around the world. To develop such systems, understanding the inner workings of the ecosystem in built environment like waste water plant is very important.

The significance of such systems cannot be trivialized, for the solutions that is developed here can create huge impact in two third of the world population living in developing world which has massive gaps in terms of sewage generated and sewage treated.

I would like to study waste water treatment plants and their resilience to extreme weather events through a doctoral program under Hydro Nations program ( Centre of Expertise for Waters ) in Scotland , for they have an accumulated experience in dealing with waste water infrastructure. Of course, what other place would a person want to go in order to study about Water infrastructure than United Kingdom which had been a pioneer in creating such infrastructure around the world including India.

Link: British Council